Spread appreciation on this national Public Display of Affection Day and your relationship might improve in many ways.

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WEDNESDAY, June 20, 2012 — PDA — public display of affection — might conjure up an image of couples holding hands and smooching in public, but a new study shows that A for appreciation may be as valuable to a healthy relationship.

"Feeling appreciated by your partner influences how you act in your relationship, and how much you want to stay in that relationship," study author Amie Gordon, a University of California, Berkeley Ph.D. candidate, told LiveScience. "Instead of just waiting for the other person to make you feel good, you can jump-start that cycle and take it into your own hands by focusing on what's good in your relationship."

Gordon's team studied 50 undergrads in relationships for about 15 months. They answered questions nightly for a week about how appreciated and appreciative they felt. Nine months later, they were surveyed again about their relationship.

The day after participants reported feeling more appreciated, they were more likely to report feeling appreciative. They were also more likely to still be together nine months later.

"What goes wrong in a lot of relationships is, if you start to take your partner for granted," Gordon told LiveScience, "you get used to having them in your life and forget why you chose to be with them."

The researchers also observed couples ages 18 to 60, recording how often they touched, how engaged they were in conversation, and how often they made eye contact — key methods of showing gratitude. The more appreciated each partner felt, the more satisfied they were in the relationship.

"The punch line is really that being appreciative of your partner is beneficial in helping you want to maintain your relationship," Gordon said on LiveScience. "When you are appreciative and you notice the value in your partner, it helps you realize what you have and makes you want to hold on to it. You have something good and you think, 'I want to keep it.' You are more responsive, you tend to their needs, and you are more thoughtful."

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Desire Helps to Forge Love

Sounds like common sense that appreciating a loved one might lead to more romance and better sex. New research substantiates that desire and love are actually closely linked in the brain.

Researchers at Concordia University in Montreal, Syracuse University in New York, and the University of Geneva in Switzerland pooled the results of 20 studies that examined the brain activity of subjects viewing erotic photos, or pictures of their significant others. They then created what they describe as a map of love and desire in the brain.

The findings showed that love and lust activate different areas of the brain's striatum, a striped mass of white and grey matter in front of the thalamus in each cerebral hemisphere. The area that is activated by sexual desire is also stimulated by sex, food, and other pleasurable events.

But as feelings of sexual desire develop into true affection, they are processed in a different place in the striatum, an area that's commonly involved in conditioning, or giving value to things that are rewarding or bring pleasure.

Interestingly, this part of the striatum is also associated with drug addiction, a finding that doesn't surprise Jim Pfaus, a professor of psychology at Concordia University. "Love is actually a habit that is formed from sexual desire as desire is rewarded," he said in a statement. "It works the same way in the brain as when people become addicted to drugs."

But love isn't a bad habit, Pfaus says. The complex emotion activates brain pathways involved in monogamy and bonding, while making other parts of the brain less active, an area ripe for future studies of the complexity of a brain in love, Pfaus said.

"While sexual desire has a very specific goal, love is more abstract and complex, so it's less dependent on the physical presence someone else," Pfaus said in a statement.

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